Crossplane: Multicloud Control Plane with Bassam Tabbara

Cloud providers created the ability for developers to easily deploy their applications to servers on data centers. In the early days of the cloud, most of the code that a developer wrote for their application could run on any cloud provider, whether it was Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. These cloud providers were giving developers the same Linux server that they would expect from an on-premise deployment.

Early cloud applications such as Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber took advantage of this cloud infrastructure to quickly scale their businesses. In the process, these companies had to figure out how to manage open source distributed systems tools such as Hadoop and Kafka. Cloud servers were easy to create, but orchestrating them together to build distributed systems was still very hard.

As the cloud providers matured, they developed higher level systems that solved many of the painful infrastructure problems. Managed databases, autoscaling queueing systems, machine learning APIs, and hundreds of other tools. Examples include Amazon Kinesis and Google BigQuery. These tools are invaluable because they allow a developer to quickly build applications on top of durable, resilient cloud infrastructure.

With all of these managed services, developers are spending less time on infrastructure and more time on business logic. But managed services also lead to a new infrastructure problem—how do you manage resources across multiple clouds?

A bucket storage system like Amazon S3 has different APIs than Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud PubSub has different APIs than Amazon Kinesis. Since different clouds have different APIs, developers have trouble connecting cloud resources together, and it has become difficult to migrate your entire application from one cloud provider to another.

Crossplane is an open source control plane for managing resources across multiple clouds. Crossplane’s goal is to provide a single API surface for interfacing with all the parts of your application, regardless of what cloud they are on.

Crossplane is a project that was started by Upbound, a company with the goal of making multicloud software development easier. Bassam Tabbara is the CEO of Upbound, and he joins the show to talk about multi cloud deployments, Kubernetes federation, and his strategy for building a multi cloud API.

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